“Dreams of Emotional Continuity: Reading and Relating in Malous bokklubb,”

Presently there is an abundance of sites, across media, promoting acts of communal reading (televised book clubs, web rings, publishers’ book discussion questions, etc.). This article forms a case study of what usages of reading and concurrently what reading subjects are framed in the Swedish televised book club, Malous bokklubb (Malou’s Book Club), modelled on Oprah’s Book Club in the USA and Richard and Judy’s Book Club in the UK. The main reading protocol underwritten by various textual fields in the show is the one of rich emotional continuity between the reading subject and its textual others. The show partakes in a middlebrow ‘women’s culture’ whose main message is that women, across differences, have something in common and that the... (More)

Presently there is an abundance of sites, across media, promoting acts of communal reading (televised book clubs, web rings, publishers’ book discussion questions, etc.). This article forms a case study of what usages of reading and concurrently what reading subjects are framed in the Swedish televised book club, Malous bokklubb (Malou’s Book Club), modelled on Oprah’s Book Club in the USA and Richard and Judy’s Book Club in the UK. The main reading protocol underwritten by various textual fields in the show is the one of rich emotional continuity between the reading subject and its textual others. The show partakes in a middlebrow ‘women’s culture’ whose main message is that women, across differences, have something in common and that the stories of almost all others can be used to work on the self. (Less)

@article{6b1de973-54a3-4736-a719-18142466a745,
abstract = {Presently there is an abundance of sites, across media, promoting acts of communal reading (televised book clubs, web rings, publishers’ book discussion questions, etc.). This article forms a case study of what usages of reading and concurrently what reading subjects are framed in the Swedish televised book club, Malous bokklubb (Malou’s Book Club), modelled on Oprah’s Book Club in the USA and Richard and Judy’s Book Club in the UK. The main reading protocol underwritten by various textual fields in the show is the one of rich emotional continuity between the reading subject and its textual others. The show partakes in a middlebrow ‘women’s culture’ whose main message is that women, across differences, have something in common and that the stories of almost all others can be used to work on the self.},
author = {Karlsson, Lena},
issn = {1367-5494},
keyword = {book clubs,emotion,identification,middlebrow,normativity,reading,women's culture},
language = {eng},
number = {2},
pages = {163--177},
publisher = {SAGE Publications Inc.},
series = {European Journal of Cultural Studies},
title = {“Dreams of Emotional Continuity: Reading and Relating in Malous bokklubb,”},
volume = {vol. 14},
year = {2011},
}